Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has gone full conspiracy buff. In a recent interview with Dr. Phil, the Secretary of Health and Human Services vowed to combat the entirely fabricated threat of chemtrails.
Dr. Phil, whose full name is Phil McGraw, hosted a town hall interview with RFK Jr. on his namesake show Primetime, which aired this Monday (the show is part of Dr. Phil’s self-founded streaming network Merit Street, but also appears on YouTube). At one point, Kennedy fully endorsed an audience member’s fears about chemtrails, appeared to blame another government agency for their existence, and said he would do everything in his power to stop them.
Even among conspiracy theories, the logic underlying chemtrails is especially stupid. The theory goes that planes have been secretly seeding the skies with all sorts of chemical weapons that have been poisoning people for decades—weapons that conveniently leave behind easily visible trails. Some people claim these chemicals are also—or instead—being used to modify the weather.
In truth, these trails are the product of condensation that usually happens when jet fuel exhaust—mostly made out of water vapor but also containing small particles of soot—mixes with cold, humid air at high altitudes. In other words, they’re basically just temporary clouds made out of ice crystals (natural clouds are more often composed of water droplets). They’re formally known as contrails, short for condensation trails.
That reality hasn’t stopped a sustained segment of the population from believing otherwise. According to a 2017 study, about 10% of Americans fully believe in the chemtrails conspiracy, with another 20% to 30% agreeing it might be somewhat true. At the time, the study found that belief in chemtrails wasn’t significantly different across different political affiliations. But more recently, the conspiracy theory—like RFK Jr. himself—seems to have drifted to the right (the one-time environmental lawyer initially ran for the U.S. presidency in 2024 under the Democratic Party, then ran as an independent, and eventually endorsed the Republican candidate Donald Trump).
Toward the end of Dr. Phil’s town hall, an audience member named Emily stated that she was most concerned about the constant “aerosol injections” of aluminum, strontium, and other purported toxins being sprayed into the skies—a statement that RFK Jr. completely took at face value when asked how he was going to address this issue.
“That is not happening in my agency. We don’t do that. It’s done, we think, by DARPA. And a lot of it now is coming out of the jet fuel—so those materials are put in jet fuel,” Kennedy responded, appearing to blame the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, part of the U.S. Department of Defense, for chemtrails. DARPA has long been a conspiracy bogeyman, though it’s not the only government agency that’s been accused of creating chemtrails.
Kennedy added, “I’m going to do everything in my power to stop it. We’re bringing on somebody who’s going to think only about that, find out who’s doing it, and holding them accountable.”
This isn’t the first time that Kennedy has endorsed the idea of chemtrails. In a post on X last August, in response to a user warning about their danger, he replied, “We’re going to stop this crime.”
RFK Jr. didn’t just ramble about chemtrails during the Dr. Phil interview—he also continued spreading misinformation about vaccine safety, particularly the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine. He repeated the debunked claim that autism is an epidemic (though this time he stopped short of suggesting children with autism have no future) and alleged that teenage boys today have half the testosterone levels and sperm counts of a 68-year-old man—a claim that’s loosely based on real research but wildly exaggerated.
Chemtrails might be the most blatantly moronic of RFK’s beliefs, but plenty of his ideas are both wrong and likely to harm many Americans now that he’s running the country’s public health agencies.
